The Sound of the Room

Photo of the live room where I work. Designed by the Walters-Storyk Design Group

Whether we stop to consciously think about it or not, acoustics has a huge impact on the work we do. At the most basic level, knowledge of the playback environment or medium affects how we approach a given project: broadcast, web, theatrical, home video, conference floor, etc. Maybe we add more bass for web distributed pieces, or reduce the dynamic range slightly for a product that is heading straight for the consumer living room. Even the most basic idea changes our approach.

Moving up the acoustics ladder, we start to talk about:

Design of our workspaces – to help us create predictable behavior in unpredictable recreation environments.

Plug-ins – that model acoustic spaces (IR Reverb) to help us match ambient space in recordings or create effect

Computational modeling – to render, in real time, things like occlusion to render more realistic interactive media

Acoustics is a lynchpin, often sitting behind the scene, that makes or breaks the work we do. None of us on the site will even think to claim the expertise necessary to approach this subject on our own. So, we’re calling in all of the help we can to make this a successful month. We have some cool things lined up for this month, but…as always…any additional thoughts and expertise from our community of readers are heartily welcomed.

If you have something you would like to contribute to this month’s theme, contact shaun [at] designingsound [dot] org. Next month’s theme will be “Noise.” If you think you have something to contribute that month instead/as well, then don’t hesitate to contact us.